Today I gave my first lesson to Danielle Miller. I was very excited when I started to hear some of the basic faults we have talked about in class. I started out by talking about her musical background and how much she already knows. Her singing background is not very extensive, these are her first vocal lessons. After this I went on to discussing posture and breathing. She does have a slight tendency to lean forward while she is singing. I tried to enforce the breathing off the release, and I think she caught on to that very well.
The first warm-up we did were lip buzzes and within that I talked about tension and how to relax the face. She started to do pretty well on the loosening up. I noticed that her chest voice goes around the A4-B4 range and she has trouble getting into her head voice. I tried to explain thinking skinny and focusing up in the nose area. We moved on into doing "E's" and she did feel a little bit of resonating, but it didn't stay very consistent. To try to bring her head voice out we did some "sing-ah's." Once again this helped a little but will just have to be practiced. This is really everything we got through which I felt was pretty good for the first lesson.
I found that time does go by fairly fast when there is progress being made. Having to listen and play at the same time was a bit challenging at times, but was surprisingly easier then I'd first imagined. Knowing the piano scales was a huge bonus. Without knowing piano I don't know how I would have done it. For the first lesson I possibly could have done better but I still feel good about it. After this it can only get better.
What a wonderful observation and lesson! I am so excited that you are making valuable connections between classroom information and studio application. How do you feel like the "talk time" went? Did you have her sing more than you explained? Just curious. Good job with keeping the "ees" (or /i/ vowel) at the forefront of the lesson to encourage a bright, forward, resonant sound. You are absolutely right---time does go by incredibly fast when progress is being made. Only when a student plateaus or is actually moving backward in terms of progress does it feel like an incredibly long lesson. I really appreciate your comment about playing and listening at the same time....all of those piano lessons are paying off! Hooray! You should share your success with Dr. C. She will really appreciate it! I am looking forward to seeing your progress throughout the semester!
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